> If you knew where the line between "true compiler" and "an> interpreter" ["just" is pejorative] was, what would you do> differently?

I am the poser of the original question on alt.sys.pdp11

It came up when some friends of mine and I were discussing system
programming languages, and we were trying to think of the first compiler
hosted on a PDP-11 which generated non-interpreted, ie. "native" code.

I didn't realize it was such a difficult question to answer.
[It's not hard because we don't know the difference, it's hard because
we can't remember the sequence of events. Like pornography, we know a
compiler when we see it. My recollection is that the early support
for the PDP-11 was mostly an assembler, a linker, and some I/O
libraries. I'm not sure whether DEC shipped a native code compiler
(as opposed to assembler) before the proto-C compiler at Bell Labs
started generating machine code rather than the threaded code that B
used. -John]